Cosmology, Ancient and Modern

Cosmology is “the science or theory of the universe as an ordered whole, and of the general laws that govern it” (OED, 1971). Science in this context can best be understood in its classical sense of episteme, of the totality of knowledge from whatever discipline or knowledge domain. In modern times, the German language preserves this understanding of science, largely lost in English. For its word for science, Wissenschaft, refers to the totality of knowledge gathered from two distinct yet complementary knowledge domains — Naturwissenschaften (the natural sciences, e.g., physics, biology, chemistry) and Geisteswissenschaften (works of the “spirit,” e.g., metaphysics, ontology, the arts; I am strongly tempted to include mathematics in this category).

Thus any cosmology — given its presupposition that the universe is an ordered whole — must include and reconcile these two main branches of human noetic experience. We might say that cosmology requires an “integrative science” approach. And more and more we see this type of approach in the work of modern cosmologists such as mathematician Max Tegmark and astrophysicist Attila Grandpierre. What is most remarkable is the strong resonance of their cosmological theories with the speculations of Plato, who was perhaps the greatest cosmologist of all time.

Plato used the language of the myth as the language of his cosmology. Any cosmology is, at bottom, a myth in the Platonic sense. Perhaps this idea can be further clarified.

The reason the language of myth must be used in cosmology of whatever type is simply that “the cosmos is not a datum of immanent experience,” as Eric Voegelin notes. Therefore, cosmology by its nature is not something that can be advanced on the basis of verifiable propositions, or subjected to empirical tests. One cannot put one’s “arms around” the Cosmos; in a key sense, the very idea of Cosmos utterly transcends the finite categories of human empirical knowledge and experience. This same constraint applies to any cosmology, be it “scientific” or “philosophical.”

Plato’s cosmological myth was radical, going to “the root”: In the Timaeus, he posits psyche — soul, self, mind — as furnishing the model of order for the Cosmos. This was in opposition to the myth of Democritus, who conceived of cosmic order “as a harmony arising from the constellation of atomic elements,” which would be the materialist view. As Eric Voegelin writes (in Order and History, Vol. III: Plato and Aristotle, 1956), for Plato “the realms of being are ... penetrated to their limits by psyche. As far as metaphysical construction is concerned, no corner of the universe is left to the materialists as a foothold from where the order of the psyche could be negated on principle. The order of the cosmos has become consubstantial with the order of the polis and of man.”

Plato thought the “language of the soul” — myth — must be the language of cosmology. For it is only in psyche, in self-reflected conscious experience, that human beings can grasp the idea of an integrated, ordered cosmic Whole, or of the idea of a hierarchy of being. Thus as Voegelin says, “the myth remains the legitimate expression of the fundamental movements of the soul.”

Plato’s metaxy — the “tensional field” of In-Between reality — symbolizes the “site and sensorium” of such movements.

Mextaxy: The “In-Between”
Plato called man zoon empsychon ennoun — the “ensouled animal who thinks,” or as Voegelin translates it, “a living creature endowed with soul and intelligence.” This is similar to homo sapiens sapiens, yet calls attention to the biological basis of human life to a greater degree. For Plato, ontologically man is somewhere “In-Between” the animal and the divine. Thus human existence is lived In-Between bodily and spiritual imperatives, in between the pulls of biological instinct and divine eros, in between life and death, in between immanence and transcendence, in between time and eternity.

Man seemingly has an innate instinct that directs him to notice that human life is a whole lot more than physical existence. Yet man becomes truly aware of this — if he ever does at all — only in self-reflective consciousness; i.e., in the dynamic, hierarchical “field” of the metaxy, where mind resonates in between the two “poles” of (1) the Depth, or ground of being (the omphalos or “navel” by which the human psyche is resonantly coupled to the Cosmos) and (2) the Beyond of divine Nous — divine Mind — that draws human nous into mutual communication and participation. Here we see a paradigm of immanent and transcendent reality that can be made luminous in human noetic reflection.

Such reflections arise from “the primary experience of the cosmos,” which seems to be more or less universal in human experience of whatever time or place, if we may judge by the seeming universality of certain human symbols, myths, and traditions. The primary experience can be summed up as follows:

“We find ourselves referred back to nothing more formidable than the experiences of finiteness and creatureliness in our existence, of being creatures of a day as the poets call man, of being born and bound to die, of dissatisfaction with a state experienced as imperfect, of apprehension of a perfection that is not of this world but is the privilege of the gods, of possible fulfillment in a state beyond this world….” (Voegelin, “On Debate and Existence,” The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol 12: Published Essays, 1966-1985, 1990).

We will have more to say about the metaxy a little later on. For now, we point out that metaxy symbolizes the order of the psyche or soul, of man’s “inner world.” But for Plato — as for Grandpierre (as we shall see) — this inner world is resonantly coupled to the “outer world” on all ontological levels. The reason for this is that man is the microcosm, the eikon (image or reflection) of the total Cosmos.

Man the Microcosm
In Platonic thought, man as he is in himself is the microcosm and, as such, the recapitulation of all the levels of the great hierarchy of Being in the Cosmos. Nietzsche’s famous maxim — “Nothing is outside of us, but we forget this at every sound” — can profitably be understood in this sense.

The implication is that man, as part and participant of the Whole, somehow contains the Whole within himself. Which is a stunning thought — and perhaps to you, dear reader, quite a risible one. For one thing, it is fashionable today to reject the possibility of transcendent reality (because as we earlier said, by its nature it is not something that can be advanced on the basis of verifiable propositions, or subjected to empirical tests). And yet all transcendence seems to require is that it not be contained within the “4D block” of space-time reality — three of space, one of time — as humans normally experience it. On this definition, Kaluza-Klein-type string theories are premised on transcendental reality, the dynamics of which such theories seek to elaborate and describe...but I digress.

In the Timaeus, Plato tells us that man has lost awareness of his ontological connections with the full range of cosmic life because at birth, the “circuits” in the “head” are “deranged.” The relevant passage:

“As concerning that most sovereign form of soul in us we must conceive that heaven has given it to each man as a guiding genius — that part which we say dwells in the summit of our body and lifts us from earth towards our celestial affinity, like a plant whose roots are not in the earth, but in the heavens. And this is most true, for it is to the heavens, whence the soul first came to birth, that the divine part attaches the head or root of us and keeps the whole body upright…. But if [man’s] heart has been set on the love of learning and true wisdom and he has exercised that part of himself above all, he is surely bound to have thoughts immortal and divine, if he shall lay hold upon truth, nor can he fail to possess immortality in the fullest measure that human nature admits; and because he is always devoutly cherishing the divine part and maintaining the guardian genius that dwells with him in good estate, he must needs be happy above all. Now there is but one way of caring for anything, namely to give it the nourishment and motions proper to it. The motions akin to the divine part in us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe; these, therefore, every man should follow, and correcting those circuits in the head that were deranged at birth, by learning to know the harmonies and revolutions of the world, he should bring the intelligent part, according to its pristine nature, into the likeness of that which intelligence discerns, and thereby win the fulfillment of the best life set by the gods before mankind both for the present time and for the time to come.” [Emphasis added]

Thus microcosmic man loses consciousness of his most intimate cosmic connections in the course of the birth experience itself — which oddly no man ever seems able to remember. This cosmic information, however, is locked away deep in the unconscious mind and is recoverable, on principle, through the process of anamnesis, or “recollection,” memory.

Voegelin writes that the “truth” of this great myth arises “from the unconscious, stratified in depth into the collective unconscious of the people, the generic unconscious of mankind, and the deepest level where it is in communication with the primordial forces of the cosmos. On this conception of a cosmic omphalos of the soul in the depth of consciousness rests Plato’s acceptance of the myth as a medium of symbolic expression, endowed with an authority of its own, independent of, and prior to, the universe of empirical knowledge constituted by consciousness in attention to its objects.

“The omphalos, through which the cosmic forces stream into the soul, has a twofold function…. It is first the source of the forces, of the sentiments, anxieties, apprehensions, yearnings, which surge up from the depth and roam in the unconscious, urging toward assuaging expression in the imaginative order of mythical symbols. The fact of this openness toward the cosmos in the depth of the soul is, second, the ‘subject matter’ of the myth, broken by the finiteness of human existence into the spectrum of birth and death, of return to the origins and rebirth, of individualization and depersonalization, of union or re-union with transcendent reality (in nature, erotic relations, the group, the spirit), or suffering through temporal existence in separation from the ground and of redemption through return into eternal communion with the ground. The myth itself authenticates its truth because the forces which animate its imagery are at the same time its subject matter. A myth can never be ‘untrue’ because it would not exist unless it had its experiential basis in the movements of the soul which it symbolizes.” [op .cit., O&H III]

Man as Microcosm in the Scientific Literature
I was very surprised to find in the works of contemporary scientific cosmologists an obvious interest in this part/whole, microcosm/Cosmos problem. Niels Bohr was among the first natural scientists to explore the issue. As Menas Kafatos and Robert Nadeau point out (in The Non-Local Universe, 1999), Bohr concluded that “a scientific analysis of parts cannot disclose the actual character of a living organism because that organism exists only in relation to the whole of biological life.” [Emphasis added]

Kafatos/Nadeau seem to go Bohr one step further: “What [Bohr] did not anticipate, however, is that the whole that is a living organism appears to exist in some sense within the parts, and that more complex life forms evolved in a process in which synergy and cooperation between parts (organisms) resulted in new wholes (more complex organisms) with emergent properties that did not exist in the collection of parts. More remarkable, this new understanding of the relationship between part and whole in biology seems very analogous to that disclosed by the discovery of non-locality in physics.”

Kafatos/Nadeau consider that Charles Darwin’s understanding “of the relation between part and whole was essentially classical and mechanistic [i.e., Newtonian].” This understanding anticipates that a piling up of a sufficient number of parts will eventually suffice to reveal the character of the whole to which they belong. Darwinian evolutionary theory, thus, has ever been primarily concerned with elucidating the relations of parts, not to wholes, but to each other:

“All nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external nature…. There must be in every case a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.” — Charles Darwin, paper delivered to the Linnean Society, London, 1858 [cited by Kafatos et al., op cit.]

The emphasis is clearly laid on particularity; Darwinian theory does not appear to be at all interested in more holistic, “spiritual” concepts — such as male/female bonding, the rise of the family; of the clan, tribe, nation, state; of the biosphere, the planet, the solar system and beyond — perhaps relying on the expectation that, given sufficient time (i.e., “eternity”), the truth of the Whole will eventually be “outed” when a sufficient number of parts have been studied. Meanwhile, all we humans need do is collect more data, and continue to wait. [For Godot perhaps?]

Need I point out that some of these holistic concepts that Darwinian theory appears to eschew are paralleled by human institutional developments that, in all likelihood, have had enormous fitness (survival) value for the species....

Kafatos and Nadeau clearly reject this “classical” approach — which is an inversion of their own thinking on the part/whole problem. In “The Physics of Collective Consciousness,” (1996), Attila Grandpierre — whose cosmological speculation is rooted in quantum field theory, quantum electrodynamics (QED), information theory, and a keenly sensitive appreciation for the human cultural past — articulates an even more radical view:

“The evolution of consciousness — as the evolution of the Universe shows us — actually is in contrast to the presently accepted evolutionary theories, which want to build up the whole from the parts. In reality, evolution started from the whole and progressively differentiated into parts, from the timeless-spaceless form (e.g., the ‘implicit order,’ or ‘pre-space’ of David Bohm and John A. Wheeler), through galaxies, through the development of the Solar System and the Earth, the appearance of the biosphere and mankind, until the development of smaller and smaller subsystems of consciousness, until the human individual. ‘Cosmologies of wholeness’ are emerging (see Ernst Laszlo, 1993…). All of the cosmic evolution formed sub-systems within systems. Evolution begins with ‘systems,’ ‘elements’ develop only later on. Every system emerges as a subsystem of a larger, inclusive system. The organization of the sub-system is made by the creator system, and the organization factor acts from within…. This fact assumes that the creator system is in a certain way transformed into the to-be-created subsystem, the ‘whole’ transformed to the ‘part.’ This global-local transformation is a necessary condition of the generation of the new system.”

Respecting this global-local transformation, something of a “fractal” nature — which I interpret as some kind of hierarchical redundancy built into the coding of the cosmic “information set” — seems to be implicit in Grandpierre’s description.

Perhaps one can go even further, and say a holographic nature is implied. The bearing of fractals and holography on these concepts is beyond the scope of the present work. Yet it may still be useful to point out here that holography has a very strange property whose discovery would probably not shock Plato in the least: Each tiny portion of a hologram encodes complete information (i.e., a “complete description”) of the whole of the image. Here is your “part and whole” quandary, envisioned as a global-local transformation, made physically tangible.

Lynne McTaggert writes (in The Field, 2003): “In a classic laser hologram, a laser beam is split. One portion is reflected off an object — a china teacup, say — the other is reflected by several mirrors. They are then reunited and captured on a piece of photographic film. The result on the plate — which represents the interference pattern of these waves — resembles nothing more than a set of squiggles or concentric circles. However, when you shine a light beam from the same kind of laser through the film, what you see is a fully realized, incredibly detailed, three-dimensional virtual image of the china teacup floating in space…. The mechanism by which this works has to do with the properties of waves that enable them to encode information and also the special quality of the laser beam, which casts a pure light of only a single wavelength, acting as a perfect source to create interference patterns. When your split beams arrive on the photographic plate, one half provides the patterns of the light source and the other picks up the configuration of the teacup and both together interfere. By shining the same type of light source on the film, you pick up the image that was imprinted… [Further,] if you chopped up your photographic plate into tiny pieces, and shone a laser beam on any one of them, you would get a full image of the teacup.” [Emphasis added.]

End of digression — which, as it turns out, has supplied some interesting analogies or metaphors by which to consider our original problems: man as microcosm, and the nature of Plato’s metaxy. Before we pull together these various strands, there is a third key element of Platonic thought relevant to the present discussion, to which we now turn.

The Platonic Idea
Plato conceived of the Cosmos as one integrated whole. He considered moreover that the Cosmos was an ensouled living being. Which stands to reason, for if man is at once zoon empsychon ennoun and microkosmos, then that of which he is the image or reflection — the Cosmos — must also be zoon empsychon ennoun. The two are “consubstantial” by virtue of a global-local transformation, and thus are ordered by the same universal laws.

For Plato, all the hierarchy of being is founded on and preserved in existence by the Idea:

“In the Platonic conception the Idea was an eidos, a paradigmatic form in separate, transcendental existence. The assumption of forms in separate existence raised the question how the separate forms could be the forms of empirical reality. The Platonic answer [was] that the flux of becoming has being only in so far as it participates in the Idea, or in so far as the Idea is embodied in it….” (O&H III)

Thus the empirical Cosmos is preeminently the living manifestation of the transcendental Idea.

At this juncture it is interesting to consider Max Tegmark’s cosmological speculation of the Level IV Multiverse (see his celebrated article “Parallel Universes”). Tegmark suggests that all of reality is structured by mathematical objects that have transcendental existence outside the 4D block of ordinary space-time. To my mind, these mathematical objects are analogous to the Platonic Forms, which can be understood as derivatives or “daughter sets” of the primordial Idea in a first-generation global-local transformation.

What is being sought here is the source of universal information that propagates in the real world so as to give rise to the astonishing variety of living organisms and inorganic systems. This is different from the idea of universal physical laws. For as Grandpierre has pointed out (in a yet unpublished manuscript), the physical laws of the universe seem to carry low information content, so much so that the richness of living forms that we see all around us cannot be accounted for on the basis of the physical laws only.

The common feature of the physical laws is they are conservation laws, which predict that systems in nature will try to find the shortest route to a state of perfect equilibrium. But as Grandpierre points out in numerous articles and his forthcoming book, The Living Universe, the “life direction” runs counter to physical equilibrium, or “heat death.” A further elaboration of this issue is beyond the scope of the present article. For present purposes it is sufficient to note that theorists suspect it is information that drives and sustains the living universe and all its creatures; and that the primary source of this information, and how it is accessed and utilized by life forms, constitute cutting-edge problems for the natural sciences at the present time. “Classical” Darwinian evolutionary theory does not appear to shed much light on these issues.

The Convergence of Ancient and Modern Cosmologies
As we have seen, Plato’s metaxy is a highly compact, complex symbol encompassing a variety of meanings, all of which have a single, central reference to man as microcosm. Primarily, metaxy is a description of the order of psyche — it is an insight into the “structure” of the self or soul in its vital relations to Cosmos. Metaxy is the hierarchical, tensional field in which human self-reflected existential experience plays out in the never-ending search for truth and meaning in life. In this sense, metaxy is the field of communion and communication between the human and the divine, symbolizing human existence as actually experienced and understood at the intersection of time and timelessness (i.e., eternity); of immortality and mortality; of the spiritual and the material.

To recapitulate what has been said earlier with the addition of new details, Plato’s model of the soul sets up a dynamical resonance between two “poles” describing the tensional field of human existential experience. At the summit, we find the drawing power of the Unknown God of the Beyond (the Epikeina). At the root, we find the Apeiron, the seemingly fathomless depth of the soul in which it finds its root in the Cosmos. This nexus, according to Plato’s insight, is the ground of being of all Life: It is this omphalos — Grandpierre terms it “navel and caul” — that joins finite creaturely existence to the eternal Cosmos in a unified, integrated, ordered whole.

In this structure of soul, we perceive hierarchical order. At its summit is aware, self-reflective consciousness, Plato’s nous — intellect, mind — a reflection (or imago Dei) of Divine Nous. At the next level we have ordinary consciousness, including the instrumental reason and feelings, in both senses of emotions and sense perceptions. Next “below” is the subconscious or unconscious mind, the “deep mind,” the contents of which may become accessible to aware consciousness by means of “recollection.” Human creativity may be associated with the ability to access these deeper mind levels. As novelist E. M. Forster observes,

“In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach.”

And the great philosopher and psychologist William James attests to the importance of access to unconscious resources:

“The recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making.”

The metaxy includes the unconscious depth in which the soul — as microcosm and recapitulation of cosmic content — has access to a range of yet-to-be-realized conscious experience. Grandpierre and others point to the extraordinary underutilization of seemingly available resources in the human brain that could be harnessed to conscious experience, to mind, if humans only knew how to go about it. It appears that now would be a good time to introduce Grandpierre’s theory of consciousness – which to my mind, at least, seems to resonate with Plato’s theory.

Grandpierre’s model of consciousness seems to imply the Platonic idea of the metaxy as the seminal field of human consciousness, in contact with its “depth” and its transcendental “beyond,” which Grandpierre terms “living logic.” It further points to man as microcosm, and suggests the Idea is a universal information set carried by a primary, universal vacuum field. Consider these passages (from “The Physics of Collective Consciousness,” 1996):

“On the physical basis presented here one can construct the following chain of events for an interaction between the mind and the brain. In the first step the information is contained and mediated by the vacuum field. These vacuum waves may interact with electromagnetic waves in giving them their information in the second step. The electromagnetic waves then may interact with the biomolecules of the brain, like sunshine interacts with chlorophyll molecules transferring the energy of the sunlight into chemical free energy. From this available chemical energy the activation potentials of the neural networks are built up. Nevertheless, all four steps could be simultaneously influenced by the vacuum waves.

“The frequencies of the vacuum waves obtained here are remarkably close to the observed frequencies at cell divisions. This circumstance suggests that the way vacuum waves interact with material waves can be a resonant phenomenon. The vacuum waves may transfer their energies and information content to material waves at the same frequencies. The real energy transfer could be necessary only at the onset of some material processes in an upper level of the mind. Here, I suggest a picture in which the different levels of our minds may work with progressively more subtle material carriers, while the deepest one works with vacuum waves without any net energy transfer taking place in the end, because the energy taken out from the vacuum may be put back by the brain itself when reading important information from the psi-field. It could be the reason why only living organisms with a significant free energy content are able to react on the basis of the information read out….

“The different vacuum waves couple us in a different scale to the cosmos and to our bodies and brains, while the electromagnetic and electron waves present couplings between our environment, our brains and local neural processes. These couplings to the different scales of the outer world represent couplings between our different mind levels, simultaneously. In this context it is important to note, that these outer sources of informations — the Earth, the Sun, the stars, and the Universe as a whole — do show a whole range of generalized organic processes (Grandpierre, A., 1995a, 1996a,b,c,d).

“In my essay (Grandpierre, A., 1995a) I argued that every element of the Universe is a kind of a double-pyramid consisting of hierarchical levels; i.e., conscious mind, deep mind, genetic mind, cosmic mind (inner world pyramid of a human being), Earth, Solar System, Galaxy, Universe (outer world-pyramid of a human being). The difference between the organisms of the Universe is only what is outer and what is inner for them, but the levels in their pyramids are similar, consisting of the same constituents. In this context it is interesting to note that our calculations show that the different organisms interact with the same range of universal fields, but their sizes determine what is ‘outer’ and what is ‘inner’ for them, and which are the long and short wavelengths compared to their physical sizes.”

An Amateur Cosmologist Attempts to “Put It All Together”
In the depth of psyche we find the link that couples us to Cosmos. One imagines both as operating according to one single, divine “program” or universal information set — a kind of “cosmic DNA.” For it appears that all living beings are such because they are able to access and utilize information in order to counter the entropy that would otherwise set up and inexorably move organisms toward an equilibrialized state of “heat death” — which would quickly become their fate under the physical laws alone.

So, how does this information get read into the universe in the first place? For it seems it must have been “front-loaded” into the cosmic system right at the beginning. And then we need to ask, how does this information propagate itself in the living universe in time?

The Big Bang theory of the inception of the Universe seems to have been broadly embraced by many if not most physicists. Back in the late 1970s, Roger Penrose (a Platonist) and Stephen Hawking (an Aristotelian) together worked to assess the probabilities for such a fiery beginning of the Universe. And they found that it was “highly probable” that the Universe did in fact have such a beginning, under all known physical laws and taking into effect Einsteinian Relativity. Later, the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation — thought to be a kind of echo of the Big Bang event — lent further credence to the theory. Subsequently, Hawking seems to have been disturbed by the theory’s theological implications, and has been working ever since to develop an alternative theory based on the concept of imaginary time — which is beyond the scope of the present article.

In any case, this writer accepts Big Bang theory as the best currently available description of the earliest events in our Universe. Which brings us to a consideration of the Singularity.

Here’s a conjecture: The Singularity is a massive superposition of all possible vector states that potentially can manifest as actual events in the Universe. In a certain sense, it is the timeless carrier of all possible information that specifies our Universe. As such, it is the source of the global-local transformations that give rise to the evolution of all organic and inorganic systems in the Universe. In particular, it is the “creator field” of which all the other universal fields of physics are the “daughters.”

Thus the Singularity may be envisioned as the timeless “implicate order” which, translated into temporality, expresses as the primary vacuum field of the universe. It may be in the primary vacuum field — as Tegmark seems to suggest — that the mathematical objects or forms that specify, organize, and maintain all existents in reality ultimately “reside.” That is, one conjectures it is the source and carrier of the cosmic “information set,” and as such it has a timeless essence.

In other words, although it governs whatever can happen in the 4D block of conventional space-time, it does not “live there.” One conjectures that it occupies its own dimension, a fifth dimension that appears to be “timelike” and yet is not “in” the time of the 4D block. From the vantage point of this hypothetical fifth dimension, it has been suggested that the timeless Singularity might appear imaginatively as a “shock wave” propagating in time.

Conclusion
It is readily apparent that cosmological speculation is something that human beings have engaged in from the remotest antiquity of the race to the present day: It is a characteristically human endeavor. The important thing to bear in mind is that such speculations are, at bottom, symbolic expressions of human self-reflected conscious experiences and, as such, cover areas of reality that are and must ever remain “open.” This is the critical distinction between a cosmology and a physical theory.

What has been set down in this article most assuredly is not “the last word” on the subject of the origin and governance of the Universe. Our claim is far more modest. For at bottom cosmological speculation is the human effort to envision the Cosmos “whole” — and to imaginatively find one’s place in it. This we ever try to do, in complete openness to the Cosmos — and to God, whose Logos it substantiates.

For at the end of the day, the present writer strongly suspects it will be found that Kosmos is Divine Eikon, too.

What a magnificient essay, betty boop!

Your essay speaks with ringing clarity to cosmology, to philosophy, to mathematics, to evolution, to consciousness, to physics and to theology. I see many parallels in Jewish mysticism as well. Truly, I wish this were published!!! But where???

In that regard, it saddens me that this essay is in chat. On the other hand, the subject deserves more than the quick read often given to articles posted on the main forum. Perhaps a careful review here will encourage you to have it published!

Of particular interest to me was the discussion of the part v the whole. My mind raced to many examples like the one you gave, evolution, where the classical approach of piling up the parts doesn't satisfy. Enter mathematics. I agree with you that math belongs in Geisteswissenschaften - because it is math which often brings such part-based theories to their collective knees. The critical density of the universe comes to mind. Moreover, mathematics is mystical in so many ways as described by Tegmark, Penrose, Barrow and many others.

For me, the metaxy is the most fascinating subject of all the fascinating subjects discussed in the essay. Then again, I have never been one to presume the firmament has a location but rather that it is a separation – in this case perhaps the barrier through which the metaxy communes.

The discussion of the singularity from which this universe sprang was also very engaging. Indeed, it is a superposition of all that becomes. By my reading of relevant articles, the scientific materialist cosmology requires that this be so and there was at one time a corresponding concern if information was lost in a black hole. IOW, it cannot be lost if it were all contained in that singularity. But, like you, I suspect this concern arises from a current lack of understanding concerning dimensionality.

Thank you so very much for your kind "review," Alamo-Girl! I agree with your suspicion that problems of dimensionality are not well understood, and this may arrest progress in scientific research, at least for a while. But it seems to me you are exactly right: No information can be lost in a Black Hole that was front-loaded into the system on Day One, especially when that information was loaded in, in a hierarchically redundant manner, and is carried by a universal field. Seems to solve that problem!

I cannot believe this piece was moved to Chat. I posted it to Philosophy. I've been working on it intensively for the past four weeks, with copious spillage of blood, sweat, and tears along the way. Plus I researched it six ways to Sunday. This was serious scholarship. I do not consider it a "vanity piece" -- but apparently, someone at FR does. Sigh. Life is not fair. :^)

Chat. B.S.

I will have to reconsider my giving, the next time FR has its quarterly fund drive.

Thank you so much for writing, Alamo-Girl -- and for your kind words and moral support.

Plato thought the “language of the soul” — myth — must be the language of cosmology

I like to say in this temporal world soul/myth to some are not real.

If one ponder our state of existance and the physical body and organism are in a state of constance decay how ever minute!

The Life force only support for certain amount of time!

The comprehention of many is to relate and think in this dimension.

To me many things that is relegated as myth, once had a life force in the temporal world.

I think it is time we come of age and start think of things in multifasted existance under various degrees of universal laws!

Earth is a state of endless rise and fall or cycle of birth and death. Yet other kingdoms Laws operate differently

Many that are eternal have limited progress and the untilmate have progression without end!

To be con't......

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on this, restornu!

I'm pinging betty boop also because we have discussed some current thinking that the universe cycles in this fashion - maturing to point and starting over again -- or alternatively, that the universe both informs and is informed.

I have been pondering both thoughts with regard to temporal dimensionality.

...the universe cycles in this fashion - maturing to a point and starting over again -- or alternatively, that the universe both informs and is informed.

Alamo-Girl, the ancient Greek conception of Fate -- the World soul cycling in an out of potency, and men getting dragged willy-nilly along in its train for better or worse -- seems to be implicit in this observation.

Yet from a Christian point of view, the same statement can be read as an affirmation of the "two-way street" that obtains between God and man.

It seems to me that successful communication is always a "two-way street." Failing that, it seems we are left to the Greek conception of Fate to settle our issues for us.

Plato thought the universe was a living being possessing a soul that waxed and waned according to its own natural rhythm or time pulse. If a man got stuck with being alive during a bad patch, then bad luck to him. One must ride the cycle -- which is operating at a timescale that has no correspondence with the human timescale, and in fact uses eons where man might use hours to measure the "passage" of time. Man born at the wrong time gets to be a victim of this ride....

Christianity is ever optimistic, especially as compared with the Greek idea of Fate, which embroils all men for good or ill, regardless of their personal qualities, talents, or efforts.

This is an extraordinarily weird problem for the modern mind to contemplate. But it might do us some good to do try. :^)

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